Democratic attitudes and behaviour are indispensable for the maintenance of democracies. Consequently, young citizens have a decisive influence on the success of the (re-)creation of democracies. Nevertheless, young people are excluded from many key forms of political participation that would encourage attention to young political views. Yet political attitudes develop primarily during the youth phase - shaped by the experiences of individuals in their social and political contexts  (Eckstein 2019, S. 417). To ensure that democratic values are passed on to the next generation, it is important to integrate citizenship education into the daily lives of young people.

Young people participate less often in elections, have less interest in political issues  (Eckstein 2019; Weiss 2020) and less trust in political institutions (Eckstein 2019, S. 405). Against this background, young people have repeatedly been accused of withdrawing from politics and lacking engagement. However, the relationship of young people to politics is much more ambivalent as a result of these developments. Studies also show that young people are interested and engaged in many political issues, but that this engagement does not take place in the traditional spaces of politics and is subject to different dynamics than the engagement of older generations. The consequences of this development can be seen in the numerous youth movements that have developed (Eckstein 2019, S. 405; Syvertsen et al. 2011).

The current young generation is particularly shaped by crises - with the Corona pandemic in 2020 and the war in Europe in spring 2022 as current climaxes. The crises not only have an impact on young people’s school education and career paths, but also have the potential to significantly shape the political attitudes of these people and thus strongly influence the future of democracy in Germany. However, it remains unclear how these consequences manifest themselves in the political attitudes of young people. At the same time, it has been scientifically confirmed that crises and conflicts can lead to serious changes in public opinion (Schoen 2006). Already for the Corona pandemic, it was found that interpersonal and institutional trust in the population decreased, economic uncertainty reduced support for welfare state services (Daniele et al. 2020) and certain narratives in social media promoted the generation of rumours and conspiracy theories (Freeman et al. 2022; Shahsavari et al. 2020).

With the war in Europe, the crisis situation increasingly intensified. Images and stories about the war were published via social media and news, the sources of which could not be verified for a long time, and the various political measures and reactions were widely and vociferously discussed among the population. This uncertainty and the lowered confidence due to the crisis-ridden period of the previous years paved the way for extreme political positions. Against this background, the article examines the following questions: Which types of young people can be found with regard to the evaluation of political reactions to the war in Ukraine? What influence do features of vertical and horizontal disparities have with regard to the formation of types?

The article uses the current example of crisis to highlight the direction in which young people's political opinion-forming is developing in Germany and which target groups can be addressed to promote or curb diplomatic or radical attitudes. With regard to political developments in many European countries, the results are not only relevant for Germany and can be translated into other national contexts.

Within the scope of the study, 3240 people between the ages of 16 and 29 were quota-representatively surveyed by gender and federal state in Germany between 24 June and 26 July 2022. The online survey was conducted with the help of an online access panel from Bilendi GmbH. The questionnaire comprised of 36 questions that were answered by the participants within 15 minutes on average. In addition to basic socio-demographic questions and concepts in the area of social participation, political attitudes in the context of the war in Ukraine were also surveyed. In order to answer the research question and to carry out a typology of young people's assessment of political reactions to the war in Ukraine, we carried our three cluster analyses. After cleaning the data, 3182 cases could be included in the cluster analyses. Using the single-link method, which has a high sensitivity to outliers, we first marked these extreme cases in the data before a suitable number of clusters was determined using the Ward method. In both methods, we choose the Euclidean distance as the dissimilarity measure due to the quasi-metric data. Unlike the single-link method, the Ward method is less prone to outliers and is a robust method to perform cluster determination. Both the resulting dendrogram and the formal Duda-Hart index suggest an optimisation of the cluster number on four clusters. Finally, based on these analyses, we performed a final analysis using the k-Means method. For this procedure, we adopted the cluster number of four clusters previously determined in the Ward procedure in order to achieve an optimisation of the cluster determination based on the given cluster number. Following the calculation of the clusters, we analysed the types descriptively before finally carrying out a multinomial logistic regression analysis. We carried out this analysis once for each cluster as a base category in order to take a comprehensive look at the relationships between the groups. As more variables were included in the model, the number of observations in the model dropped to 2688 cases due to missing data. The result of the analysis is a detailed presentation of the factors that lead to a classification in one of the clusters.

The results show four clusters of young people in terms of their attitudes towards political measures in the war in Ukraine: (1) the diplomatic, who are particularly in favour of EU-wide sanctions as well as the admission of Ukraine into the EU and the termination of economic relations with Russia; (2) the all-rounders, who agree with all measures, but do not want to stay out of the conflict completely; (3) the militants, who are in favour of a reintroduction of military service and an active participation of Germany in the fighting in Ukraine, as well as radical measures such as a suspension of all telephone calls with the Russian president or entry bans for Russian citizens to Germany; (4) the nationalists, who would rather stay out of the conflict and place a greater emphasis on recalling a German identity and protecting its own borders. From cluster 1 to cluster 4, satisfaction with the financial situation as well as satisfaction with democracy in Germany and trust in political institutions decrease constantly. While the diplomats are comparatively highly educated, younger and better off, the all-rounders tend to show the opposite characteristics. The militants tend to be disinterested in politics and the nationalists are characterised by low trust in political institutions and dissatisfaction with Germany's democratic structures. The multinomial regression analysis shows that education, gender, political trust and satisfaction with democracy significantly predict membership in the respective clusters. Other variables, however, only play a role for certain groups. Overall, the results of our study illustrate that recording the attitudes of young people is important in order to reach the different target groups with measures in formal and non-formal education and to counter conspiracy ideologies.

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